The track was justly inducted into the public domain in 2013, after a clever documentarian filed a class action lawsuit against the record label.
In addition to being boring, repetitive and brutally cheerless, “Happy Birthday to You” has the distinction of having been mired in litigious controversy for the better part of a century, dubiously lining the Warner Music coffers by squeezing millions of dollars in bogus royalties out of everyone, from TV networks to the Girl Guides of America. Nobody really likes “Happy Birthday to You.” And in Wonder’s rendition we have an excellent candidate to replace it entirely. It’s so good, in fact, that it makes you wonder what anyone is doing singing “Happy Birthday to You,” and why so many of us persist in the habit despite compelling reasons to abandon it entirely. It’s joyous and effervescent it has beds of smooth’ 80s synths and is, absurdly, almost six minutes long. Wonder’s “Happy Birthday” is extremely delightful. “Black people (me and my entire family, for instance) have been singing it at birthday parties for decades… It’s infinitely cooler and more soulful than the white thing that may have inspired it.” “Yes, the black ‘Happy Birthday’ is real,” she writes. In 2016, Aisha Harris wrote a paeon for Slate about what she simply calls “the black Happy Birthday song,” which, she discovered when she informally polled them, her white friends had almost uniformly never heard of.
Indeed, black families all over America have tended to prefer “Happy Birthday” to the white-favoured “Happy Birthday to You,” defaulting to it in unison each year. Noah’s was not the only family to substitute Wonder’s ballad for the traditional. It’s an upbeat, enormously charming R&B classic, an enthusiastic political rallying cry that also happens to have a catchy and versatile birthday-celebrating chorus. It was conceived in commemoration of Martin Luther King Jr., whose national holiday in America was actually signed into existence on the strength of a campaign helmed by Wonder and lead by this song. Written by Wonder in 1980, this version of Happy Birthday has nothing whatsoever to do with the original. Instead of “Happy Birthday to You,” Noah’s family celebrated with a different annual tune: “Happy Birthday,” by Stevie Wonder. If you told someone from another culture… it was like a death song.” “Even today when I see people sing it, it doesn’t seem fun at all. “Happy Birthday to You” is “the saddest song,” Noah reflected, “the most depressing shit” one could hear on the day of one’s birth. “It wasn’t something in my life.” When his classmates in school first launched into it, he was bewildered. Noah was born and raised in South Africa, where his family never sang him “Happy Birthday to You.” “I never grew up singing the traditional song,” he told the audience of The Daily Show during a commercial break. When Trevor Noah, the host of The Daily Show, turned 36 last week, he revealed something illuminating about his conception of birthdays: for the first part of his life, he had never even heard of “Happy Birthday to You.”